Audyssey Upgrades Room-Correction Tech

developed by Audyssey Labs for
home audio components delivers 32-times the resolution of MultEQ XT technology
with the same processing power.

Chris
Kyriakakis, Audyssey Labs' chief technology officer told TWICE the new
technology, called MultEQ XT 32, is "pushing the limits of room correction" and
is already incorporated in multiple new products from Denon and Onkyo, he said.

Limited by
the processing power of current-generation chips used in home audio components,
MultEQ XT corrects for frequency-response and time-domain errors at several
hundred points across the frequency spectrum, but MultEQ XT 32 expands that to
more than 10,000 points by using processing power in a smarter fashion,
Kyriakakis explained.

The new
technology uses different sampling rates in different bands, assigning lower
sampling rates to bands that don't need a higher rate to deliver optimum sound.
"Below 200Hz, you don't need to sample at 96kHz," he pointed out.

With the
same processing power, MultEQ XT 32 delivers 32 times the resolution, enabling
the technology to correct for a greater number of narrower response peaks and
dips. The finer control "shows most in the low frequencies below 250Hz where
most problems occur," he said.

As with
MultEQ XT, the new technology selects the filter points based on a particular
room's acoustics.

MultEQ XT
32 comes in handy because of the processing-power limits on audio DSPs used in
audio components, Kyriakakis explained. "There's so much technology on the
chips," and Audyssey has to share the processor's MIPs (millions of
instructions per second) with other technologies.

Audyssey
can also apply its new processing techniques to its Mult EQ XT technology to
reduce the processing power required by Mult EQ XT, thus bringing that
technology to lower priced audio components, he said.

In
contrasting Audyssey's room-correction technology with competing technologies
built into audio components, Kyriakakis noted that the other technologies use
parametric equalization to correct for room acoustics only in the frequency
domain, whereas Audyssey corrects in the frequency and time domains. Competing
technologies also correct only in about 10 bands within the audio spectrum, he added.